


sandhya

by weaslayyy



Category: Jodhaa-Akbar (2008)
Genre: F/M, and bc im tired of the stupid 27 pages of wip staring at me balefully, this is truly a terrible and unbetaed fic but im posting it bc i can
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2019-04-08 18:05:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14111025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weaslayyy/pseuds/weaslayyy
Summary: Jodhaa goes to find her husband at sunset, the day her brother dies and the Emperor grants mercy to a man that sought to claim the Peacock Throne.





	sandhya

The Mughal camp is jubilant in the aftermath of a civil war that wasn’t. Soldiers trade stories of the duels they might have had, the bravery they would have shown if their Emperor had not destroyed the enemy singlehandedly. Wine flows freely as men dance reenactments of their own glory, of their Leader’s, and of all the glory that is to come under the reign of Akbar.

Jodhaa, still clad in the orange and green from the battlefield walks from one end of the camp to the other, following the fluid silence that seems to fall of its own accord the closer she gets to the Emperor’s tent. The sun is slowly beginning its descent and the desert air is just cold enough that she regrets leaving her shawl when she changed out of her traveling clothes.

“Empress.” A soldier bows and Jodhaa, who has brought her veil down so that it covers her face, smiles faintly and nods. The guards part and Jodhaa brushes the tent’s fabric aside to find her husband still clad in his armor, head balanced in the palms of his hands.

She steps forward again, and wonders if he can hear the rustle of her skirts, the tinkling of the jewels she wears that signify her status even here on the battlefield. Her own martial intuition tells her that he does because no warrior so trained as he could give an enemy the benefit of surprise.

“Jodhaa,” she hears, and the man who speaks her name has not yet opened his eyes. “You are here.”

“Yes,” Jodhaa says after a pause. “I am.”

Her husband’s armor clatters as he straightens, standing and turning to face her. He has not yet cleaned the wounds on his face, nor brushed away the dust. Jodhaa surges forward, pulling her veil free from where it was tucked in at her skirt and crumples the fabric in her hand so that she can dab at the congealed blood.

The Emperor inhales sharply and grabs for her outstretched hand before she can touch his face. “Jodhaa,” he says again, the light in his eyes shifting into something of wonder. “You are here.”

Jodhaa has been married a year and admittedly spent much of that living in confusion at the ways her husband understood the world. But now, even after he has made her his wife in all of the ways he finds a way to confound her still, his eyes the green of her veil and full of the awe she had assumed would dissipate after he had discovered the skin hidden beneath her skirts.

“Where else could I have been?” she asks carelessly, looking around for water to wet her cloth and a cushion for her husband to sit on. His grip yields to even the faintest strength she applies and within moments she has located both water and seat, placed as if they were waiting for someone that the Emperor will allow tend to his wounds.

“Agra,” she hears, balanced on her heels as she wets the corner of the cloth held in her hand. “Or Amer.”

This again. “Why would I be in Amer?” Jodhaa avoids her husband’s gaze by concentrating on his well-defined jaw, bruised at some point by the blunt side of a spear. Jodhaa presses the cloth gently, removing dirt without causing too much pain and hopes that the cool of the water will soothe the ache he must be feeling.

“Your brother is dead.” Jodhaa drops the wet fabric and rocks back, the surprise and shock and grief that she has managed to fold into the very recesses of her heart collapsing her body into a heap on the ground.

“My brother is dead,” Jodhaa agrees and shudders despite herself. All of a sudden she is cold, skin like ice as she shakes with the breeze of the desert night wind. “But I am the Empress of Hindustan.”

Never has a sentence so grand left a woman feeling so small. Sujamal was her life for so many years and now he is gone, even as Jodhaa still lives. Worse still is the fact that Jodhaa believes she will recover. She is the Empress of Hindustan, wife to the Emperor who confessed that he loved her in a room that glowed like molten gold. Her brother’s loss was her husband’s life and the victory of their empire.

At some point, she will grieve. For now, she must try to forget the sight of her husband covered in her brother’s blood, the feeling of it dried against her skin, the broken solidity of her brother’s body as she clung to it and wept. She is the Empress of Hindustan.

Lost in her recollections Jodhaa does not hear the clink of armor until a shawl is wrapped around her, warm with the heat of the day’s sunlight. She closes her eyes and allows him to gently move her body until it rests against the seat he had previously occupied. Slowly, her husband removes his armor, metal falling to the ground as he unties straps and pulls the pieces away from his body.

“I can do that,” Jodhaa says but does not open her eyes. The world seems easier in the dark somehow, the ties of daylight vanishing until all that is left is the feeling of a person’s heart.

“So can I.” The breastplate falls and now the only herald of her husband’s movements is him. She opens her eyes when she hears the splash of water and watches as the Emperor pushes back his sleeves and wets each of his arms, his hands, his feet, his mouth and head before reciting verses from the Qur’an.

He is praying, she realizes and wonders that she has not seen it before. He bows, feet on a mat he has procured from some space in the tent and then prostrates himself in a way that seems so similar yet so different from the way Jodhaa knows. Her husband finishes his prayers with his legs tucked under his body, the ritual Arabic even more foreign to her than his usual Persian.

“What do you pray for,” she asks once the silence that falls has become awkward. The Emperor stands, folding the prayer mat and stowing it in a trunk and then moving back to sit on the floor. 

“Peace,” her husband responds, gruffly. “I am tired of death.”

“Is that why you let him go?” Jodhaa cannot say her brother in law by marriage's name.

“Yes.” He refuses to meet her eyes.

Jodhaa exhales. “What if he comes back?”

Her brother, who is dead for a lesser crime than treason, runs no such risk to the Empire.

“Then I will kill him, and feed his corpse to the vultures.” His voice is hard, and Jodhaa remembers when he killed his first brother in front of her, ordering him thrown again and again until there was no breath left in his body. She believes her husband.

“Your sister does not deserve widowhood,” Jodhaa says as consolation and even as she speaks the words she recognizes their truth. She has lost a brother today, but then so did Banu, banished as she and her husband are within the reach of the Empire. Jodhaa still has her parents, her friends, her other brother. Jodhaa still has her husband.

“I was weak,” her husband confesses and his guilt cuts the strength of his body like the strings of a puppet. Jodhaa rises, and, still clutching her cloth walks to him and kneels.

She takes another corner and wets it in the water that remains in the pot, brings the fabric up to the skin around his eyes and dabs.

“No,” she says, and for the first time since she had forced herself to release Sujamal’s corpse, she remembers not just the stench of her brother’s blood but the strength of his grip when he clutched both Jodhaa and her husband’s hand.

 _You are a great man_ , Sujamal had said as he died, and Jodhaa wonders at how good her husband truly is. To run the risk of death in single combat to spare the lives of his army, to grant mercy to a man that had ordered his assassination, who had conspired to bleed his Empire and kill his beloved uncle.

She kisses his eyelid, and perhaps she tastes the salt of her husband’s tears. Perhaps she hears his whispered apology for not being able to save her brother. “You were right.”

**Author's Note:**

> sandhya means twilight in sanskrit. please read review share etc!!!!!


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